A Question that changed the way I think about the world

"Tell us a Question that changed the way you think about the world."

This was an essay requirement for one of the colleges I was applying to. Are you sure you are not joking? How can 'one' question change someone's vision of the world! That was insane, but I had to fill up the requirement for the application, so I started to think about it. I searched through my entire life, all my memories, not for an answer, for a question: 'The Question'. My initial response was to question the biggest truths about the universe, bring up some philosophical mysteries that would make me look smart to the admission officers. After a long, tiresome search, I found it; but unfortunately it was not a philosophical puzzles that perplexed the greatest minds of the planet for centuries, rather it was as simple as a bitter, sour fruit. So, really a simple fruit taught me to think about the world differently, not questions like 'What is the meaning of life?' or 'Where did we come from?'. So I wrote about myrobalans. The reason for me to share this piece of writing is to show that, if thought carefully, the tiniest experiences of our daily life can be turned into a deep understanding of ourselves.

Why did I feel like eating the myrobalans (আমলকী)?

Myrobalan. The one fruit that I hate more than any other fruit. I wonder why people buy and eat those bitter, sour tasteless fruit while so many other fruits are available. It doesn’t even taste like a food!

One day, I was having a daytime sleep after an all-nighter. I woke up at noon getting a call from the newspaper I work for part time. There was an accident in my area and I had to cover the news. I rushed to the spot, worked under the scorching summer sun to collect data, interview the local people and so on. When the job finished, it was evening and I was on my way home. While walking on the street I saw some vendors were selling delicious myrobalans, it immediately watered my mouth. Wait a second, did I say ‘delicious’? I am confident that I hate myrobalans, so why did my mouth watered? Why did I feel like eating the bitter, sour, tasteless myrobalans?

Once a thought come across my mind it is hard to get rid of. I started thinking to find the answer. The primary answer was, because I was hungry. In the business of the day I couldn’t take my breakfast, lunch, so by evening I was extremely hungry and at that time any food would seem mouth watering. The answer makes sense, but I wasn’t satisfied, I went further with that question. My hunger is a physical process, but my ‘wanting to eat’ is a psychological process, how did the hunger had an effect on my ‘wanting to eat’, while I have a firm belief that ‘I’ am the master of my brain? This question struck me at a very deep level and opened several new thought processes in my brain.

·         Thought 1: Our brain ignores the smaller discomfort in the face of a larger discomfort.
This theory can be used on personal, social, national, even on global scale.

o   I didn’t like to eat vegetables, after this finding, I stayed hungry for a period of time and vegetables didn’t seem as distasteful as usual.

o   A society that never experienced a challenge will be more likely to be fastidious about unnecessary aspects of social life rather than main aspects of the society.

o   A nation or the Globe in inner conflict can be united with a larger common danger or the hoax or threat of a larger common danger.

·         Thought 2: As higher negative feelings can turn neutral or lower negative feeling to appear as positive feeling, higher positive feeling can also turn a lower positive feeling as negative or neutral feeling. This taught me:

o   In the first local science Olympiad I attended, I secured a 9^th position among 400 competitors which appeared to be a great success for me at that time, but later in my school years when I continuously stood first in 3 competitions and then became second in the fourth, the last one became a great frustration for me.

o   The higher one’s expectations will be, the higher chance for him or her to be unhappy about smaller accomplishments. So higher goals ultimately make us unhappy.

·         Thought 3: Same thing can be of different value to people in different situations.
Just like a different time had different reaction from the same fruit, the same thing can have varying value to same or different people in different situation. I learnt from this theory:

o   If an economic structure can be established that distributes asset from the higher class of society to the lower class in a reasonable economic manner, the total amount of happiness and peace around the globe will be higher.

o   The small amount of food wasted by someone in a western country can mean life and death to a hungry child in Africa. So it taught me the importance not wasting anything that can be valuable to someone else.

·         Thought 4: Our thoughts, feeling, desires can be manipulated, modified.
As the hunger manipulated the my ‘wanting to eat’, almost all of our feelings can be manipulated and misled by other variables.

o   For example, if a person hurts me without a reason, I will feel angry and want to hurt that person back. In this case, my feeling, which is ‘anger’ and my desire, which is ‘wanting to hurt the other person’ both is controlled by the person who hurt me first, not by my own opinion or interst.

o   This taught me to control my reaction in a variety of situations and acting according to my intellect and experience instead of letting someone else control my behavior.

·         Thought 5: Happiness can only exist with sorrow.
As negative experience can create or increase the intensity of a positive feeling, a positive feeling cannot exist without the existence of negative experience. If there is so much positive that it is hard to find a negative, then the positives will lose its value and work as a negative feeling. So negative always accompanies the positive.

o   So it is important to remember in times of happiness that there must come the time of sorrow, and also in time of sorrow that there must be a time for happiness.

o   There can be no ultimate place for happiness like Heaven or Eutopia according to this logic. So instead of seeking for the ultimate happiness we should accept the sorrow and keep trying to overcome it.

·         Thought 6: The things that we think that make us happy may be fabricated.

One of the biggest driving force for human is seeking for happiness in materialistic things. After satisfying the need for happiness or positive feeling with one thing, that positive feeling looses its value and takes the place once occupied by neutral feeling. At that point, human brain takes even upper positive feeling as target and this phenomenon continues, driving human desires higher and higher with no boundaries. This is a very inefficient way of acquiring happiness and ultimately brings bigger frustration when not being able to acquire the too high positive feeling. In my finding with the myrobalan the most sustainable form of happiness would be a continuous loop of negative and positive feelings. So instead of finding the upper positive feeling or higher happiness, we should search for a lower or higher negative feelings, i. e. less or very unhappy experiences. And after overcoming that experience we will get more happiness than than the upper positive feeling could have given us.

Whew… So, what do we understand from this lengthy discussion? It’s all over the myrobalan again. When you eat it, it is sour, it is bitter, in a word, it is the opposite of sweet. But if you drink water after it is eaten, the water will taste sweet! So, this question on myrobalan has changed the way I think about happiness, sorrow, expectation, feelings, materialism and gave me a new perspective to look at the world. Thanks myrobalan, for not being tasty.

Mosquito- My college application essay

“How many mosquitoes will it take to completely fill our house?”

THWAPP!

My father’s strong right hand collapsed with my left cheek, dimming the eight years old eyes that were glowing in curiosity. I felt like I was hit by a thunder. The strong sound of the slap travelled through my skull to my inner ear. My head swung to the right. The left cheek was burning in pain, the eyes filled with drops of tears, my head bowed down in the right in shame when my father spoke, “How many times do I need to tell you to stop thinking these nonsenses?” How can I make my family understand this ‘nonsenses’ are the biggest part of myself. The pleasure I get in thinking something, and in sharing what I’ve thought. But I believed that if I kept questioning, one day my family members would be tired of beating me and accept me for being different.

I was born in a rural uneducated family in Bangladesh. My father couldn’t make it to high school and my mother could hardly write her name. Life for them was a battle for survival. Curiosity? No place for that. Life is better as it is, no questions asked, no harm done. In such a family I was born a child always asking explanations, to know everything around me. Everything, seriously! From tears while cutting onion through changing shape of moon to ‘why-the-jug-broke-while-thrown-full-of-water-but-didn’t-break-while-thrown-empty?’. Honestly, the last one could only be explained by Newton’s second Law- and I was 6 years old. (If Newton didn’t say that before me, this could’ve been called Masum’s Second law today!) Soon my parents ran out of their religious explanations, but I was still in the dawn of my questioning. Annoyed, they took the hard way. Each of my questions was gifted with punishment. Slapped, canned, beaten, I moved to my school teachers to add a new vocabulary to my curiosity prize collection- ‘Ridiculed’. The teachers humiliated me in front of my class, my friends started calling me names like ‘Frog-scientist’ (I was secretly proud about it, because it had ‘Scientist’ in it).

So, by this time you might be thinking what an annoying little boy I am. Don’t you want to know why I questioned? From an early age I had somewhat a lower memory and a diffused attention. No one diagnosed me ever, so I do not know what this disease is called. But this two hand in hand, gave me the prize of becoming a slow learner. Yes, you read it right. It will take me longer time to grasp something than the average Joe. I had to think deeper to understand a simple concept and analyze what others could do with intuition. And when I analyze, the thing that I’m learning becomes more fun. Every learning becomes a small piece of puzzle that gives me an extraordinary contentment after solving. And this gave me a different way of thinking and exceptional creativity.

Hmm.. Curiosity, creativity, what’s next?

I was a sailor who loves to sail, but doesn’t know where to go. It was no before my ninth grade when I met an extraordinary Engineer named Mahatasin Azad who changed my life completely by adding it to a goal. He told me that to be a scientist I have to learn the existing theories first. He taught me how to make the boring and dull study interesting. When I was frustrated, he told me about great people who overcame obstacles and shaped the world. Silently, he gifted me with another quality named- ‘Persistence’. I learnt from him how to work for someone for getting nothing in return. I am still trying to pay him back by teaching, inspiring curious rural students who fail to get their questions answered. Teaching them to never stop questioning until the answer is found.

Anyway, can you tell me how many mosquitoes… ?

For those who have a test tomorrow

The Galacton is hunting through the universe for extraordinary people with unimaginable imagination. People who could do things that others failed to imagine. He wanted to take their brain to make a super computer that could predict every alternative future. This will allow Galacton to win every galactic battle and win all the water in the universe. And without water, all species will die and he can recreate life wherever he wants. And by creating life from the beginning, he can modify it in his way, he can change the course of evolution of every species and become the God of the new universe. Now all he needs is some extraordinary brains or as he calls them Exons.

Exons predict the existence of intelligent beings in a galaxy by calculating the distance of the planets from the stars. After conquering the Canis Major Dwarf, Omega Centauri and the Andromeda Galaxy Galacton approaches the Milky way. The Exions inform him about a blue little planet around the star named Sun in the Milky way where the galaxy's greatest mind can be found. Galacton marches his spaceship toward the blue planet that the natives of the planet call Earth.
By teleporting 40,000 light-years away from earth and traveling towards the earth all in seconds, Galacton collects all light ever emitted from earth. Analyzing this light waves the Exions learn about the whole history of the intelligent species of planet earth, i.e. human. The spaceship remains 400,000 kilometers above the earth's surface as an invisible geostationary satellite. The Exions reports that the most intelligent human on this planet have died 59 solar years ago, but his brain is preserved in a jar. Galacton sends his microbots to collect the brain of the most brilliant man in the human history, Elbert Einstein.
The microbots secretly reach to the brain and sprey some Srinkon particle over the brain. Shrinkon is a charge neutral particle that decreases the velocity of electron in an object resulting in lower centripetal force. This causes each individual atom of the object to shrink to the quantum level so that they can be carried with ease without anyone noticing. After unshrinking Einstein's brain, Galacton reactivate neurons of the brain. "Hello Einstein", says Galacton, "They say you are one of the biggest genius in the galaxy, are you?" "Well, everything is relative," Einstein replies with a German accent."you can never tell who is a genius and who is not only by reviewing the past." "Of course I can tell. Look at the lady singer dancing on the stage (pointing at Justin Beiber from 400,000km from earth's surface), his next album is going to be a flop, not a genius; look at the guy who is writing lab report of a girl (pointing at a  guy writing on a paper) while the girl is dating another guy, not a genius; and look at this asshole (pointing at you, right this moment) who is surfing the web while having a test tomorrow, not a genius." "I bet the asshole is going to pass tomorrow's class test." "You dare challenge Galacton! Okay, I accept your challenge. If the asshole (this word may have some other meaning in Galactonic language, cause you are listening the translated version) passes tomorrow's test, I will return the water to all the planets and give up my plan for destroying the Universe, and if he doesn't, I will destroy the Milky way galaxy along with your blue planet. Mwahahahaha......."

Now, kiddo, the future of the galaxy is in your hand, so please try to study tonight and take the test well.